Although Queensland employment did indeed fall by about 30,000 in 2016 — the biggest fall for any calendar year since the current employment series started in 1978 — the LNP has ignored the surge in jobs over the past ten months, which has offset the 2016 loss more than three times over.

The most recent figures also show Queensland now has the strongest annual employment growth in the nation, although as one expert pointed out, after a year of relative weakness in 2016, the state's job market has been coming off a lower base.

The LNP is not justified in using the 30,000 figure from 2016 to illustrate its assertion that Labor, which has been in power since February 2015, has cost Queenslanders jobs.

While the unemployment rate in Queensland, at 5.9 per cent, has been slowly trending down, it remains above the national average, and only slightly below Tasmania, which has the highest unemployment.

Like some other states, the unemployment rate has been higher than it otherwise might have been because of an increase in the number of people actively looking for work. And, as a second expert noted, five out of six states are grouped in a relatively narrow band of unemployment, meaning Queensland's unemployment ranking could quickly change.

Furthermore, as two experts noted, state government policy is only one of several factors that influence the jobs market.

Queensland farmers are suspected to have defied rare federal government intervention and cleared a large swath of land without commonwealth approval, according to conservationists.

The native vegetation was in a reef catchment, meaning the clearing could worsen pollution on the Great Barrier Reef. In addition, government-commissioned studies show it provided habitat to several threatened species.

Queensland is experiencing a boom in tree clearing – rates jumped 33% in 2016, in a region that is already considered the only “global deforestation hotspot” in the developed world. About 400,000 hectares were cleared in 2015-16, meaning Queensland now has two-thirds the annual rate of deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon.